Vouchers may not work for new antibiotics

There’s a stunning dearth of new antibiotics in development. Companies don’t have much incentive to throw the necessary millions into developing drugs that, ideally, are not particularly profitable: New antibiotics can remain at their most potent only if they’re used sparingly. So, to compensate, lawmakers are proposing policy that offers vouchers to companies — potentially hastening the approval process for other drugs in their pipeline.

But these vouchers may not be worth their cost, according to a new analysis published in Clinical Infectious Diseases. Creating a simulation, the researchers examined 10 antibiotics that were approved between 2007 and 2016 and analyzed how they might have performed if they’d received exclusivity vouchers. Turns out, it would have cost an extra $4.5 billion in spending on medicines over a 10-year period, STAT’s Ed Silverman writes.

“We’re not saying the policy is necessarily a bad idea, but we need to be honest about how much it’s going to cost,” one of the paper’s co-authors told STAT.